4 minute read
Why Every EVP Looks the Same
Author
Devin DaRif
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Pull the employer value propositions from five Fortune 500 companies in the same industry and remove the logos. You probably can't tell them apart.
Career growth and development. Inclusive and collaborative culture. Meaningful, impactful work. Competitive total rewards. Flexibility and work-life balance. The words shuffle around, the design systems differ, but the substance is interchangeable. Five different companies, five different agencies, millions of dollars spent, and the output could belong to anyone.
Build a brand on universal answers and you get a brand that describes everyone and differentiates no one.
The Process Produces Sameness
This isn't a failure of creativity. The agencies doing this work are talented. The problem is structural. The standard EVP process produces sameness because it's designed to.
The process works like this: conduct employee research through surveys and focus groups, ask people what they value about working here, cluster the responses into themes, polish the themes into pillars, wrap it in a campaign. Every company follows more or less the same methodology. And every company's employees say more or less the same things, because humans have the same basic needs. People value growth. People value flexibility. People value feeling like their work matters. People value being treated well. When you ask universal questions, you get universal answers. Build a brand on universal answers and you get a brand that describes everyone and differentiates no one.
The Brief Is the Problem
The deeper issue is what the brief asks for. Most briefs frame the problem as "help us attract more talent" or "differentiate our employer brand." These sound reasonable. They're also the wrong questions. They assume the solution is better marketing when the real issues are often upstream of marketing entirely.
What's actually true about working here that isn't true about competitors? Not aspirationally true, actually true. The honest experience of the place, including the trade-offs. Most leadership teams struggle to answer this in a way that couldn't apply to their direct competitors. That struggle is the insight. If you can't articulate what makes you different, neither can candidates. They'll decide based on factors you can't control.
Where does internal reality diverge from external promise? This question makes people uncomfortable, which is why it rarely appears in briefs. But it's the question that matters most. An employer brand built on wishful thinking will crumble when candidates become employees and discover the distance.
What would you never say out loud, but everyone inside knows? The things that don't make it into the culture deck. The actual reasons people leave. The trade-offs inherent to working here. You don't put these on the careers page. But acknowledging them internally is necessary for building anything honest externally.
A Better Brief
The agencies will answer whatever questions they're asked. If the brief asks for differentiated messaging, they'll produce differentiated messaging. The brief is the company's responsibility. And most companies give briefs that ask for marketing solutions to what are actually truth problems.
A better brief starts with different questions. Before any external marketing, understand what's actually true. Where does reality match aspirations and where does it fall short? What makes you genuinely different, or do you need to become different before you can claim it?
The output might be smaller than five pillars. Sometimes it's one thing. One true thing that nobody else can claim, articulated clearly enough that the right people recognize it. That's a brand. Everything else is a brochure.
At WorkingTheory, we often start before the brief. We’ll write it with you, and the business case you need to secure the funding. The best employer brand work isn't about better messaging. It's about better truth, and the messaging follows.
